Xinutop Marine OS
20210925: This is a dead project based on heavily outdated Debian packages.
DESCRIPTION
XINUTOP-NAV is a Linux portable or installed marine OS, built from Debian stable packages with Xfce desktop environnement. It provides, with about 500Mo, a base generalist system and essential marine applications such as:
- OpenCPN: naturally ! chartplotter, tides, AIS, grib files, GPS interface and others NMEA navigation datas (dashboard). Handle raster (*.kap) and vector charts (CM93, S57/S63).
- Polarcom: virtual instrumentation, from NMEA datas.
- PolarView: chartplotter, tides, AIS, grib files, GPS interface and others NMEA navigation datas (dashboard). Handle raster (*.kap) and vector (S57/S63) charts. Trial version, but fully fonctionnal, one month validity.
- XTide: tides with numerical and graphical display, worlwide coverage.
- Zygrib: download and display weather grib files.
- Fldigi: reception and display radio weather-fax and NAVTEX, via the sound card.
- Muplex: NMEA multiplexer
- Rastow: raster charts organizer
- OSD Depth: display water depth with big digits above any application (aka “on top”).
Xinutop is made in the KISS mind with a special care of simplicity, efficiency, reliability, lightness (who say bloatware ?) and can operate from multiple data devices (HDD, SSD, USB, SDcard, Flash) on a great variety of x86 compliant computers, from up-to-date hardware to low power or old processors. They poorly supporting the growing greed of currents OS, less and less compatible with embedded hardware, according to Wirth's law. Today it's much easier to add programs (only the programs that you need) on a simple system base than eradicate from the system heart softwares that you are useless.
Xinutop can run as a portable operating system on removable device, but also as a main operating system on hard drive. The memory usage after startup is about 100MB. To make Xinutop unbreakable (may I say “unbrickable ?”) the necessary system files are locked and can't be deleted or modified by a normal way.
Xinutop is assembled with Debian 8.x packages (Jessie) and include these features:
- A robust architecture: main filesystem in squashfs, boot system protected, no write access.
- A fast boot provided by lrd scripts, more simple and very much faster at boot than casper, the default live system for Debian-Ubuntu. (ex: ~30s from a compact-flash on a modest Intel/Atom n270 single core platform)
- A persistent mode that allows to keep the user data and system changes in a transparent user layer above the main filesystem (as “data” partition in Linux-Android).
- A restore mode (factory reset) allowing to findnize exactly the original system (simply by deleting the user layer). Interesting if you want try audacious or hazardous sofware solutions !
- A “home-save” function, to automatically save and move user home datas during a restoration.
- A ramdisk mode, which boost time access, running Xinutop from a virtual harddisk emulated in memory (RAM mini 1Go). You can start it from a slow device as an USB key and run it faster than a conventional installation on a HDD. All your changes and datas are keeped at reboot.
- A simplified boot and installation (no questions !) , simply copying by block mode to your device.
- The full compatibility with applications of the Debian distribution. You can install and run any other application from your user layer.
On left: Xinutop on a venerable rugged Panasonic CF-M34 (2003) PIII 700MHZ - RAM 256Mo.
On Right: Xinutop on a up-to-date rugged tablet Xplore. I5-quad cores 1.9/2.9GHZ - RAM 4Gb
Xinutop is under GPL V3, then you are free to use, distribute and modify it, but at your own risk and under your own responsability !
INFOS AND DOWNLOAD